New PhD course: Urban Transformations

Håvard Haarstad is co-organising a new PhD course to be held at the University of Oslo, on Urban Transformations. The overarching question for the course is simply; how can we understand and conceptualize ongoing urban transformations? In addition to Haarstad and Per Gunnar Røe (University of Oslo), the course offers seminars by well-known urban theorists Kevin Ward (University of Manchester) and Jane Jacobs (National University of Singapore).

How can we understand and conceptualize ongoing urban transformations? Social theory appears to have rediscovered the city as the key site for exploring the critical challenges of our time – climate change, migration, energy transitions, technological innovation, inequality and more. Cities allow for, both an examination of how those abstract challenges are enacted, practiced and lived on the ground, and for spaces to intervene in them through living labs, experimentation, and other context-sensitive activities. Social theory has attempted to grasp the complexity and spatiality of urban change by drawing on policy mobility literatures, assemblage theory, political ecology, socio-technical transitions perspectives and others, which attribute urban change to the human and the non-human, and to urban actors as well as to transurban relations.

In this course we seek to advance understanding of the nature and dynamics of transformative change in contemporary urban settings. It will draw on and explore a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches relevant to this theme. The course combines lectures and discussions based on paper presentations by course participants.